Lunatic SUV driver harassing cyclists

YouTube user Dfriel1 and a pal went out for a Sunday bike ride on a road east of Longmont, CO, when a driver in a Ford Explorer (license plate Colorado 893 EKG) pulled up behind them and rode their tails for five minutes*, blaring his horn and holding up the traffic behind them. Despite their having pulled into single file, and despite the ample room for passing, the driver appeared to either want to express a general displeasure for cyclists, or believed that cyclists should actually pull off the road in the presence of cars. They Colorado State Police have received a report, and Dfriel1 says he's located other cyclists who've had run ins with this driver.

As a Founder of TrainingPeaks.com I encourage everyone to get out and ride bikes as part of a healthy lifestyle. Everyone no matter what their age or where they may live should have the right to feel safe when riding whether it be for health, fitness or simply commuting to work.

It’s quite easy to understand drivers and bicyclists and pedestrians and truck drivers and cabbies getting on each others’ nerves in Manhattan or downtown SF where there’s not really enough space to co-exist with less than perfect etiquette. Out in the middle of nowhere is just bizarre.

Out in the middle of nowhere, there’s only one lane in each direction. All it takes is someone who has no more than 5 minutes to get somewhere 5 miles away (despite the fact that the road only has a 45 MPH speed limit) who gets stuck behind a 20 MPH bicyclist the whole way for them to learn that bicyclists are evil; they make you late for work and get you fired, they make you late for your doctor’s appointment and you get sick or hurt. Couple that with people who think that bicycles aren’t transportation, they’re toys, that nobody over the age of 16 should even be on a bicycle for any reason? Then it’s “people who ruin my life with their *childish* hobby.” Then add in whiff of Agenda 21 “the communists are coming to take away our cars” paranoia and it becomes “radical environmentalist terrorists who ruin my life with their childish hobby that they want to use the UN to impose on us at gunpoint” and it gets REALLY scary.

Don’t flame me, I don’t agree with any of these arguments. But the county next to mine, St. Charles County, Missouri, has had an escalating bike/truck war for years now, fought out in city council meetings, county council meetings, public meetings, and, yes, on the roads. It keeps making the news that there is an actual majority in that county, and a large and vocal plurality throughout the region, who react viscerally and violently to the sight of an adult on a bicycle, period.

I would rather take my life in my hands manoeuvering through heavy and aggressive city traffic than finding myself on a country highway or road with a transport truck approaching behind me. Also, many rural communities are “self-governing” and so a driver with a head of steam and a loaded pickup can do as he pleases with few or no consequences. Cyclists have to be nimble on the road and fortunately are usually more athletic and springy than a typical driver.

Apparently the 75 year old driver doesn’t realize that there’s things that cyclists have called iPhones that can record video and upload it to the internet right then when he is busy being an asshole.

He may have been an asshole when he was younger and people put up with it because they had to, but its a new world out there and if you’re being a dick, might as well wave it around out your window and wait for the cops…

Sure sure, everyone is so quick to take the side of the poor cyclists. But what if the driver was having a heart attack, and was hoping for assistance, eh? What then? Then the cyclists would be the douches here. Yeah. Definitely.

I personally know two people who were killed because a driver over the age of 80 had a heart attack while driving. In the first case, the man drove into a bus stop and killed 6 people (one was my friend’s husband). In the second case, the man drove into three high schoolers (from my kids’ school) who were biking on an otherwise-empty rural road, killing one and leaving the other two seriously injured.

I know you meant it as a joke, but the first thing I thought of while reading your post was that there’s no way he would have been driving so straight for 5 minutes if it were an actual medical emergency.

It’s refreshingly rare that I encounter an asshole driver such as this one. But when I do, I make a show of photographing their license plates. Stories in the news like this please me, because they make that tactic more effective as a disincentive.

I wish this guy had his license revoked. Harassment is pretty bad, but when you go out of your way to harass someone for no reason other than you’re an asshole, and you do it with your car, you’re endangering a lot of people.

I remember when I was 16 and got my license, my dad would say, you’re controlling a 2000 pounds of steel on the road. You can’t use it to express your emotion. Doing that turns your brain off.

And it’s true. Letting your emotion get the best of you makes your limbic system start inhibiting your cerebral cortex. It’s generally okay if you’re walking around. But you can’t afford that when you’re driving.

I mean, isn’t the point of a driver’s license documenting that you’ve been certified to know the rules, and that you agreed to follow them on pain of revocation? This driver was breaking the rules. With no extenuating circumstances. And for the express purpose of harassing someone, much more vulnerable than the driver in his massive, high momentum vehicle. Endangering people’s lives in the process.

By the power of logic, he should have his license suspended or revoked. Right? That’s what happens when you break a bunch of rules with your car, while also doing other illegal things using your car, harassment being one of them, making implicit threat of violence being another.

Also, he’s driving in a completely unsafe manner even with respect to any other cars that may approach. So, to summarize, he’s harassing the bicyclists, and presenting a hazard to other drivers. Too bad there were no pedestrians around so he could have hit the trifecta.

Road bike tires and gravel/grass shoulder, so they’d have to brake to nearly stopping in the roadway itself before turning off. Not safe. And since this driver has some serious issue, he may decide to stop too – and maybe use his hands to operate a gun instead of a steering wheel. You never know. And the cyclists have as much a right to be there as the asshole in the truck does.
After 25 years of riding in urban traffic, I’ve become fairly numb to the shitty antics of drivers. You have to to keep your sanity.

Not sure that would be a sensible thing to make obvious, since this guy is already displaying signs of being an aggressive asshole, and he’s driving through a country that allows civilians to carry guns.

Is it bad that my instinct in a similar situation would have been to pull in front of him and just slow to a stop? I feel like adding irritation would have been potentially unhealthy but if someone is being an asshole like this they deserve to have the favor returned.

Best case scenario is that you slow him to a stop and he actually has to get out and face you like a human being, cars tend to act as dehumanizing factors, it’s a lot easier being an asshole from the relative anonymity of a car.

Or, you have what happened to me a few months back. I pulled in front of a driver at the traffic lights (like I’m supposed to). He then rolled into me. I thought it was an accident so I went to his window to tell him he ought to be more careful, where he pulled a metal poll and threatened to “really hit me”.

In this scenario the worst that’s likely to happen is that he’ll get pissed and nudge you.

I have to say though, people that antagonise drivers at speed are idiots, endangering more people than themselves. Might seem like right thing to do, but if they plough into the back of your car there’s not much of a last laugh involved.

Or speed up and murder you. That’s exactly what happened to a commuting cyclist in my city. The driver would have gotten away with it too, because it was in a rough, empty, industrial part of town, but when he ran over the man (and his bike)the car’s license plate came off and was found underneath the cyclist’s body. True story.

I read about a case where a driver running a red light killed a cyclist and got off scot free. Folks were saying stuff like, if you want to get away with running a red light, just make sure you kill someone on a pushie while you’re at it, then you’ll be sweet.

Everyone represents his or her own mode of transportation with aggression when there are tight spaces. Pedestrians, roller bladers, eco-bike riders, cyclists, mothers and dads with baby carriages are part of a long list on the sidewalks and trails. The crowded roads and streets meet the paths and then there is chaos and fury. Bad city planning.

In all seriousness, I think this is one of those rare cases where you’ll not likely get any disagreement from either camp. The cyclists were way off to the side, the road was quiet with plenty of room to pass, and the driver’s asshattery was just beyond the pale.

Usually, you get angry drivers demanding the bicyclists be forced off the roads, and militant pedestrians [or angry drivers posing as pedestrians] demanding the bicyclists be forced off the bike paths, and then they agree that bicyclists should be ‘culled.’ It drives me nuts.

Seriously, if he’d have run them over even, there would still be the ‘cyclists are reckless’ trolls making comments. I remember a girl killed a cyclist because she was texting and swerved so far off the road that she hit him with the opposite side of her car, and of course there were still the usual: “That’s terrible, but cyclists aren’t innocent…..”

Okay, I’ll bite. I’m a driver who’s courteous to bicyclists and gives them plenty of room and allows them the right of way even on those extremely rare occasions when I legally have the right of way. I do this because I figure I’m in a large steel and rubber cage that weighs over a ton, while all they’ve got between them and the road is a small metal frame that weighs less than a twentieth of that. AND THEY DRESS FUNNY. Seriously, what’s with those ridiculous cyclists and all that spandex and those weird things they have on their head? And what’s the deal with that little metal frame they use for holding their water bottle? Why don’t they use a cupholder like I do?

No flamewar. I’d just like for everyone to travel on the correct side of the road again. Bikes ride with traffic, peds walk against traffic, cars drive where they’re supposed to without swerving all over the freakin’ place because the driver can’t be arsed to put down the phone. Is this too damned much to ask for on a two-lane road?

I’ve come across a lot of people over the years who think that bicycles are pedestrians, and are supposed to be on the other side of the road. I can’t seem to convince them otherwise. I wonder if this driver believes that too.

Funnily enough, In Savannah you’ll come across a lot of cyclists who think that they are pedestrians, and should cycle on the other side of the road. Including the asshat student who cycled the wrong way up a one-way street, through a red light she couldn’t see from the wrong side, and got hit by a tour car. Generally, I like cyclists, but the ones in that town are fucking morons. The pedestrians aren’t a lot cleverer, either – they all walk in the middle of the goddamn road instead of using the sidewalks. And don’t get me started on the car drivers. It’s as if no-one in the entire fucking city knows what a stop sign means.

Well, in Boston, pedestrians know they always have the right of way, Bicyclists know that they shouldn’t have to stop for anything, and Drivers believe traffic rules are mostly ‘suggestions’ (how else to explain the frequency of driving THROUGH oncoming traffic to get ahead of someone at a turn?)

See? Everyone knows exactly what they are doing! The fact that the city doesn’t seem well designed to support any of these modes of transport certainly doesn’t help…

I did that once in front of a cop. He simply informed me that the preferred direction was opposite to my direction of travel, and sent me on my way. In a way, it’s like jaywalking: if you’re not good at it, you never get anywhere.

It’s those people riding their bikes the wrong direction on the sidewalk who get killed by cars where I live. Even though there are bike lanes with directional arrows on nearly every major street in town.

I read an article by a bike lawyer explaining that tiny children learn to ride their bikes this way, then never unlearn it when they get older. So I made a point to teach my older children how to ride a bike *with traffic* and not get killed in the process.

IMO salmoning is actually safer, as long as you know the rule for it. In a LHD country, that’d be, be prepared to go behind folks turning right into the street you’re on from the side you’re on, because they almost certainly won’t know you’re there, and watch out for folks turning left off the street from behind you, because they’ll be lucky to notice you too.

It puts you in control of the risk; you don’t have to rely on being seen, and your job is just to stay out of the way. It can slow you down a lot if there are many turning cars though.

Myself, I go for taking the lane, with pulling off the road if traffic is backing up behind me and it’s safe to do so. That way, I am DEFINITELY seen (with salmoning, not being seen is still bad, because someone could easily turn left across your path and if you don’t see them, they don’t see you, you’re dead), I have control of the traffic behind me (almost all people don’t want to hit you), and I have an escape route to the right. Also, I ride a recumbent trike, a class of cycle often associated with elderly and disabled people, which probably helps. (Driver really don’t want to run over the old guy/cripple, even though I’m neither.) And, because they look DIFFERENT, they get noticed more easily.

One thing that helps is that Ohio law allows passing a vehicle going less than half the speed limit in a double yellow, 100% legally.

Oh, and further regarding salmoning… I’ve seen a cycle salmoning on 21st St in Newark, OH, a section where there’s no sidewalks, and no shoulder. That’s right, the cyclist was salmoning IN THE TRAVEL LANE. Not taking it, but still… I was at a complete stop in my car, as far left as I could get in my lane, and the guy nearly hit me. That’s idiocy, right there.

I lived between Savannah and Charleston once, where the typical car riders were giving me no berth whatsoever when I was driving my bike.
After I was hit, I decided to make like a pedestrian or Brit and switched to the left for good,
They have a much harder time hitting me if I can see them coming. Olé!
I was stopped by cops several times but let go [left] after explaining that following the law would be suicidal. Never did get a ticket. Cops know to be far more worried about getting run over than about getting shot. They could relate. I guess. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZDIwaRWCl0

The problem with this, is that you are coming from directions that drivers are not expecting traffic to be coming from. Right turns, left turns, they are looking where traffic is supposed to be coming from, not the other side. Not going to tell you how to ride, but there are just as many dangers that way. You also increase the closing speed and impact energy when going at each other.

Correct, but they aren’t looking for pedestrians going that rate of speed, so they don’t look further down the sidewalk to account for speed of cyclist. Not going to argue about it, because there are a lot more well worded reasons all over the internet. Just be careful, and if you get hit, you’ll most likely get stuck with most of the liability, so be careful.

I can look for turning cars, which are generally slower than cars running down the highway.
I can’t look for cars running me down from behind.
Going against the direction of motor traffic puts the responsibility on me, gives me a chance to save myself, instead of relying on everybody else’s goodwill and care.
I have often been run off the road in this way.
Nobody bicycles there. Too dangerous.

Have I mentioned that it is rather very rural between Savannah and Charleston?
It’s all forest and marshes.
Not too much turning. Lots of idiots.

You just can’t forget getting hit from behind by one of those[Image] at 80 mph without any warning. It popped my arm out of its joint, which still hurts every day a decade later.
Nobody stops for some guy lying on the side of a highway.

I might be going out on a limb here, this really could be a case of unreasonableness on the part of the driver, but could this be a real-life case of what you see in “Little Miss Sunshine”, where the horn gets broken and is constantly honking? Some honks seem prologued and broken up in the video, and it reminded me of the scene from “Little Miss Sunshine”.

What pisses me off about this is that as far as I am concerned, the only proper use for a horn is to announce “I HAVE LOST CONTROL OF MY CAR. GET OUT OF MY WAY.” The one time I was caught in a black ice patch and skidded at 5 MPH, I used the horn and was misinterpreted by onlookers. Scariest 10 seconds of my life.

Here in MN, it’s commonly used as an anti-turn signal. Since people can’t be arsed to see if there’s a car currently located in the place they’re attempting to move into, you use it to stop them from switching lanes right into your side.

The driver was an ass, and the cyclists were doing their best to let him pass during the video. I hope the tickets he got will make him think twice about being a jerk next time.

As for Antinous’ comment, “Out in the middle of nowhere is just bizarre.” You have to understand the area. I live in this area (actually driven down that exact road a couple of times), so I will do my best to share my experience.

This “out in the middle of nowhere” county is jam packed full of professional cyclists and cycling teams. I have never driven more than a mile in the daylight hours without seeing one or more cyclists in team-printed spandex flying along on $5000 bikes. Often it is 4-8 of them at a time. Thankfully, for the cyclists and the drivers, there are wide bike lanes along most roads (not the more rural one in question).

It is “refreshingly rare” to have cyclists misbehave on the road, but some do. I am not talking about the very polite cyclists in the video. When the bike lane is wide enough for two cyclists abreast, and three or four cyclists are riding abreast, taking up half the road, and chatting in moderately busy traffic, it makes a bad impression on drivers.

Cycling isn’t only a form of recreation out here, it is an occupation for some and a religion for others. I am happy to “share the road” with the atheletes around me, and, overwhelmingly, everyone does, but there are bad actors on both sides in this out of the middle of nowhere place, and it gets magnified by how often cars and bikes encounter one another.

Bike riding in Japan was a pleasure, but doing so here scares the bejeesus out of me.

I will never ride a bicycle on the road in any country or city where doing so isn’t very, very common. Drivers that don’t have to deal with bike riders on a daily basis, and thus expect them, think to look for them, and respect their right to be there make it not worth it for me.

Did you hear about the guy who put a (fake) turtle (and also a snake) on the shoulder of the road to see who would swerve out of the road to purposely hit them. Only 6% of drivers purposely swerved to hit the critters, but, out of that 6%, 90% drove trucks and SUVs. When I bike, I NEVER trust SUV’s. Chances of them doing something like what’s in this post always seem much higher…I’VE GOT LOTS OF METAL AND I WILL THREATEN YOU WITH IT BECAUSE YOU ANNOY ME!

This driver was obviously rude and dangerous and the cyclists were more than courteous. Glad they caught the guy. Now to MY experience recently. Large group of bikes, 30 – 40 on a small country road riding in a long and wide group. I wait for traffic to clear and begin to pass. About half way around the group they start yelling and gesturing. As I get near the front it suddenly becomes obvious that the group intends to turn left and my passing them is causing them a problem. Obviously we need a way to put a turn signal on the back end of a bike convoy! Or limit the length of that convoy so that cars can it pass safely in bunches of a few bikes at a time.

I agree, cyclists should generally be equipped with left arms. Also, cyclists riding in convoy need to be aware that convoys have no special rights – they’re just a bunch of individual people riding individual bikes, and having an imaginary Les Nesman string from one cyclist to another doesn’t mean they don’t have to accommodate other people.

I ride in a weekly community ride made of about 100-200 bikes. The group is like a labor union – it makes us all stronger. I (perhaps naively) view it as a funeral procession – something that people in cars can just wait a couple minutes to slowly move past. Not that people in cars are the least bit patient.

The scary part is after I leave the group, I no longer have its protection and have to remember to duck the cars.

in Athens every Friday about after midnight there are a couple of thousand riders that get on the streets in a convoy, riding all over the city till early morning with police escorts. Although its cool to participate I cant help but think of the drivers stuck behind the convoy which of course can’t really ride in single file. Not all drivers share my positive feelings towards bicycling unfortunately.

I noticed that the road was a 2 lane affair with a double solid stripe down the middle. In most rural areas you come across slow traffic such as tractors and the like. That slower moving traffic will usually pull to the side and let the faster traffic go ahead on those narrow no-passing double solid stripe roads. That elderly SUV driver was probably trying to figure out why these kids on bicycles refused to pull over and let him pass. After all, the law says he cannot pass on that road.
Having lived in a rural area such as that, I can tell you that not one local would refuse to pull over and let faster traffic pass. In the SUV drivers mind, the cyclists where simply being rude.
What does it cost the cyclist to pull off the road?

It would likely cost the biker one or both tires, as well as the time to replace them. Road bike tires are not meant for dirt and gravel.

But, the bigger question is, What does it cost the SUV driver to swerve over to his left a few inches, for a few seconds?

On the sea, the larger vessel always has to yield to the smaller vessel. The (obvious) logic is that the larger one has the possibility of doing more damage, but also that vessel can move (and, therefore, get out of the way) faster. Why doesn’t this view transfer to the roadways?

No matter how you look at it, the bikers were doing everything that should have been expected of them, and the SUV driver was an asshat.

Commonly held misconception, even among cyclists. Actually, especially among cyclists. I live down a gravel road, and I run 23×700 slicks at 100psi.

What would prevent me from riding off the side of the road under those circumstances is that I would be quite likely to go down, either when leaving the asphalt or when getting back onto it. (Well, that and the fact that it’s just as much my road as his; if he wanted to be in front of me, he should have left his house earlier.)

“On the sea, the larger vessel always has to yield to the smaller vessel. The (obvious) logic is that the larger one has the possibility of doing more damage, but also that vessel can move (and, therefore, get out of the way) faster.”

Right of way is determined by the situation; the relative nimbleness of each vessel is a significant determiner, but there can be other aspects that take precedence. Generally speaking, however, larger vessels are less nimble and thus are LESS likely to have to give way.

You must know different rural drivers than I do, because the one’s I know would pass the very-near-stationary bikes in about .03 seconds using two feet on the (empty) oncoming lane and never think twice about it. And if they *were* caught behind a tractor or combine that could or would not pull over, they would NEVER, EVER honk at them.

They were not being rude, in fact I think they were amazingly polite. They were occupying the far right of the road giving this guy plenty of opportunity to pass safely. There was clearly plenty of room for him to pass the cyclists without incident if he wished. Here in Connecticut drivers are required BY LAW, to give cyclists and pedestrians 3 feet of room when passing. Cyclists in turn have to ride as far right as road conditions safely permit. Many other states have similar laws. Clearly these guys were as far right as they could reasonably ride without endangering themselves. It was easy to see in this video that the driver could have passed safely but choose instead to be the real obstruction to traffic and harass these cyclists.

In Colorado where this took place, they passed a 3ft passing law, and it also including an exception to double yellow crossing when passing cyclists to give them 3ft. So he was fully within the letter of the law to cross the double yellow and pass when it was safe to do so.

1945 – Boulder, CO
Lila and Buddy Ernst are being remembered as upstanding members of the community. Last Friday the couple were brutally slain by two bicycles during a home invasion and robbery. Taken during the attack were a Sears and Robuck pump, 3 -in-1 Oil Can, and a deck of cards. Neighbor Sammy Jefferies commented, “These things are becoming a menace to society. I still can’t believe this happened.” Police are looking for two suspects based on evidence from the crime scene including some tracks and scuff marks – a Schwinn – Red – approximately 27 inches, and a Firestone of undetermined size. The couple is survived by one son, James, aqe 8.

What I saw showed the driver legally driving behind the cyclists. As a cyclist, I’d prefer a driver to pass me. But, the fact is, there’s no law requiring that.

So, I get it that cyclists don’t like this person, but I’m not sure what law was broken.

I ride a scooter, so I’m more often going closer to the speed that cars drive at. If a car comes up on me, I’m usually waiting for them to pass. Some don’t, and I find it annoying. But, there’s no illegality about it.

I’m a bit surprised that no one is considering the possibility that this may be signs of early dementia in the driver.

According to the follow-up posted by a commenter, the driver is a 75 year-old man, whose wife died 2 years ago. His neighbour of several decades states that this was uncustomary behaviour and that he had always known him as a reasonable person.

That little bit a background combined with how completely irrational the driver’s actions are in the video kinda make me worry about him as well. Hopefully he has family close to him who are aware of the incident and will think of keeping an eye out for other signs of trouble.

The biggest problem with drivers in the US isn’t that they’re assholes; it’s that they’re not very good drivers, it’s too easy to get a license and there’s no functional program for getting incompetent drivers off the road.

The two riders in this video were both riding single file, and to the right of the white line – in other words, they were not blocking the vehicle’s lane *at all*.

They slowed a fair bit in hopes that the driver would pass – but he didn’t, he chose to remain behind them, driving slowly (for that road) and laying on the horn.

I live not far from where this video was shot, I ride roads like this all the time in a group, and I have never seen behavior like this from local drivers. There are bikes out on these roads All. The. Time. If you live in this area and drive, you have to be pretty used to cyclists.

I think we should only get 3 honks a month on the car horn. Then, someone cuts you off, you press the horn, and nothing happens. You’re like, “Crap! I wish I hadn’t seen Ricky on the sidewalk!” – Mitch Hedberg